Chapter 2
EVAN
I was loading dishes smeared with maple syrup into the sink when the knock came at the front door of the house. The sound sent a bolt of dread through me. Dad’s here. My father always knocked. Thumped, rather. The doorbell was right there. Eye height. Dad knocked, because a man knocks.
I walked through the kitchen, stiff, edgy.
Glanced out at the gaggle of kids that had arrived not long ago, eager to spend the day with my son, Chris.
They were clustered on the back verandah now, some of them still tucking in to the pancakes I’d carefully laboured over only to be issued with a painfully awkward ‘Thanks’ from about half of the ten kids present.
I tried not to take it personally. These were kids for whom all social interactions were hard.
Shy, pimpled, greasy nerds who felt at home in the library, who loved their teachers, who still had sleepovers.
Chris’s tribe. Some of the boys were wearing eyeliner, and one of the girls showed up wearing a velvet corset.
She was going to go paintballing in a velvet corset. Jesus.
The old man was standing there with his hands in the pockets of his filthy jeans when I opened the door. He didn’t say hello. Just locked his dead-fish eyes on me and said, ‘We need to talk.’
Cancer, I thought.
Because I’m a piece-of-shit son, I always thought that when Dad turned up or called unannounced. Come ooooon, lung cancer!
‘Can it wait?’ I asked. ‘It’s Chrissy’s birthday.’
‘That was yesterday.’
‘No.’ I sighed. ‘It’s today.’
‘It can’t wait,’ Arthur grunted, pushing past me into the hall. ‘Your office. Now.’
I shut the door, turned and got ahead of him in the hall, wanting to cut him off before he had one of his classic interactions with Delle or one of the kids. Delle came into the hall, a doe hearing the footfall of hunters. ‘Oh, hi, Arthur. We weren’t expec—’
Arthur grunted as he turned into the home office. I gave Delle my best placating wave before closing the door.
‘This’d better be quick,’ I said. We arrived in a room the family shared, shelves crammed with Chris’s PlayStation games and werewolf novels, boxes of Delle’s art supplies, some police files I had printed and brought home. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘There’s been a murder in Redbelly overnight,’ Arthur said. ‘And you’re going to get yourself on it.’
I felt a tingle of energy in the centre of my chest, reached for the phone in my back pocket.
Dad wasn’t a cop anymore. Hadn’t been active in more than two decades.
But somehow he always had his finger on the pulse of the region, knew when there’d been a drink-driving arrest, an assault, a drug raid, long before the jobs showed up on official police channels.
Sure enough, I opened the New South Wales Police Active Incident app and found a listing that was only seventeen minutes old, for a town on the other side of my region: REDBELLY CROSSING, CRITICAL INCIDENT, 1 DECEASED.
‘Right. Jesus. Okay. Technically it’ll be Louis Dodge and his crew on that, from Wisemans. ’
‘You think I give a rat’s arse whose case it is technically?’ Arthur widened his eyes. ‘It’s a murder, Evan. It needs to be yours. The body’s not cold yet. There’s still time. And I need you to get assigned to it, because—’
‘Yes.’ I put a hand up. ‘Yes, I know, you don’t have to—’
‘—I’m tired of living under the shadow of your colossal fuck-up.’
You don’t have to say it, I thought. But he did.
Of course he did. Because Dad was like that.
He’d be talking about how I’d screwed up on the job, and what it had done to my loved ones’ lives, what it had done to the Powder family’s reputation, for decades to come, whether I did anything to clear the shadow of shame or not.
Sure, he pretended it wasn’t, but what I’d done to disgrace myself was the best thing that had ever happened to my father.
It had almost got me fired, and meant Arthur had to come in swinging for me. It put a leash around my neck.
‘Who told you it’s a murder?’ I asked. ‘Where’d you hear about it?’
‘It’s all over town already. The publican found her about an hour ago.’
I rubbed the back of my neck, where a ball of stress was already knotting. ‘But it’s Chrissy’s birthday.’
‘What did you just say?’ Dad narrowed his eyes, freezing mid-action as he slid a packet of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his flanno.
‘I said, it’s my child’s birthday. I’ve got eleven kids out there that Delle and I are supposed to take paintballing.’
‘You’re taking them where?’
‘Paintballing. It’s a game.’
‘Evan, listen to me very carefully.’ Arthur licked his thin, sun-ravaged lips. ‘I am trying real hard, real hard, not to leap over this desk between us and put your head through that window behind you. The restraint that I am showing is frankly mind-boggling, even to me.’
‘Dad.’
‘As if I should have to sell you on the idea at all …’ Arthur drew out a cigarette, his mean, disgusted eyes still on me. ‘This isn’t going to be some three-day slapped-together paperwork-heavy piss-in. It’s a girl stabbed to death in the pub.’
‘Jesus, really?’
‘Your reluctance to start making moves to get yourself assigned to this case, because it’s your child’s fucking birthday and you’re taking him and his merry band of retards “paintballing”, is making me want to weep for you, Evan, and for myself,’ Dad said. ‘You owe me my reputation back.’
‘I get it.’ I put my head in my hands. ‘I get it.’
‘A nice, juicy murder is just about the only thing that’s going to bleach the stain of what you did out of public memory, my son.
’ He jammed the cigarette between his jaws and lit up, right there in my family’s office.
‘And if you’re smart, you’ll not only solve this murder but you’ll get yourself wounded badly in the process.
You could make a lot of people happy doing that, getting med-catted out of the job. ’
I kept my face passive. ‘I’ll talk to Delle.’
‘You’ll talk to Delle?’
‘I’ll tell her what—’
‘Saints preserve us.’ Dad covered his eyes.
‘—what’s going on. I’ll call Twitcher.’
‘Yes, yes, go and beg for permission from the women in your life.’ Dad got out of his chair with difficulty, favouring his damaged shoulder, and exited the office, shaking his head. ‘I’m going to go chuck myself off the nearest bridge.’
I went out of the office and down the hall, hearing the front door slam closed behind my father and knowing the nausea his visit had left me with wouldn’t settle for the rest of the day.
The kids were all gathered around Chris at the table on the back deck.
Terrible postures. Unwashed hair. Chrissy was licking the inside of his lip where a silver stud was embedded, making the bobble at the end jut out from his face in a way that made me want to gag.
The youngest Powder male held up a box wrapped in black paper for a photo, made the sign of the horns with his other hand.
Then he started unwrapping it. Delle took my elbow.
I couldn’t look at her. Wasn’t ready yet for my second roasting of the day.
‘What was that all that about?’
‘Nothing. Work.’
‘Is he gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did it occur to your father to come out here and say happy birthday to his grandson?’ Delle asked. Like she actually wanted my father anywhere near her or her child. ‘Would that have taken more than a few seconds?’
‘Delle, on my sixteenth birthday, Dad threw a shoe at my head for making him feel old,’ I told her. ‘Can you drop it?’
‘What did he want?’
‘I have to go to Redbelly.’ I drew a breath that hitched in my chest. ‘And I need you to—’
‘Evan!’
‘—I need you to not start with me, Delle.’ I lowered my voice. Some of Chris’s friends had taken their eyes off the gift unwrapping and were watching us. ‘It’s exactly what we need. It’s a murder.’
Turmoil in her eyes. The long-held desire to lift us out of the shame of our scandal with a good, solid case, something that might bring my rank back up, get me a posting somewhere out of Mangrove Mountain.
She swallowed her anger so hard her throat constricted.
A little came out anyway. ‘I’m going to be stuck with these weird-ass teenagers all day, alone. ’
‘You want to go solve the murder instead?’ I asked. ‘We can swap.’
Chris dropped the wrapping paper on the table and turned over the gift.
‘Oh ho ho!’ He lifted up a box. Posed with it for another photo. ‘Shit! Aw, this is fucking sick! Thanks so much, guys!’
Chris leapt out of his chair and came over to show the gift to us.
The voices in the room were bumbling and tumbling around in my brain, coming in and out of sharpness as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to tell Hayley Twitcher.
I glanced at the design on the front of the box.
Couldn’t bring myself to read the words.
‘Oh, fun.’ Delle smirked. She was never angry for long, Delle. More than half the reason I’d married her. ‘It’s one of those ancestry kits.’
‘A what?’ I asked.
I felt Chrissy bump into my shoulder as he huddled in. ‘A DNA swab kit. To find out your genealogy. Marty did one.’ He pushed the box into my hands. I knew he was searching my distant eyes for validation. ‘He found out he’s seven per cent Norwegian.’
A sinking feeling hit my already churning stomach.
‘You spit in a test tube and, like, send it off to the company,’ Chrissy insisted. ‘And they give you, uh, an assessment of your genetic ancestry. You know? Dad?’
‘It’s awesome, isn’t it, Evan?’ Delle poked me.
You want to know more about our family line? I thought. Are you insane?
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘It’s really awesome.’
Chris took the box back and the kids returned to their huddle.
Delle went into the kitchen. I stood alone in the corner of the verandah, trying to make sense of the strangely heavy blanket of dread that had wrapped itself around me in the wake of Dad’s visit.
On the face of it, I should have been happy.
A murder in the region was a morbid kind of win for me.
Okay, so Dad would have his hand clamped on the back of my neck for the next few days, pushing me to not screw this up like I did everything else.
And Delle was going to be exhausted and resentful by nightfall, run ragged by Chris and his friends, and she wouldn’t be subtle about letting me know it.
But even accounting for these things, the feeling wouldn’t lift that I’d just taken a first step down the wrong path.
As I packed a bag, said my goodbyes and stepped out the front door, already dialling my boss, I had the growing sense that these were the waking moments of what was to be a living nightmare.